The Myth of NLP Rapport

By Rintu Basu NLP Business, NLP Rapport, NLP Sales, NLP Training No Comments 10th October 2011

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In yesterday’s post we looked at a couple of things that would stop you developing good rapport skills.  Today we will look at a way of developing rapport that is calculated to give you minimum results for a huge amount of effort but is still taught as commonplace amongst the NLP community.

Deconstructing Common fallacies in NLP Rapport Building Techniques

Poor NLP Trainers will tell you to match and mirror people as a route to rapport. This has come about through the idea that when people are in deep rapport they tend to match and mirror each other’s body language. Spend a few moments people watching to realise the truth of the matter.

Match, Mirror, Pace and Lead

There are two key problems with this approach:

1. Matching and mirroring is a rapport indicator not a rapport generator (although if you have nothing else it is at least something to try).
2. The reason you are creating rapport is to lead people to the result you are trying to achieve.

For this reason it seems to make sense to develop a process where you can covertly take charge of a conversation and lead people to where you want them to go.

Yesterday I defined rapport as a process to increase the responsiveness of your client / subject / audience. I am hoping that you can now see the value of using a definition like this rather than the usual NLP woolly stuff about relationships, trust, harmony, building bridges or even the slightly more pragmatic but almost as useless matching and mirroring body language.

On the Advanced Persuasion Patterns Programme we look at ways of getting straight to leading the conversation in a way where people want to follow. This would include using:

• Charisma Patterns with an audience so they automatically hold you in high esteem
• Opening anticipation loops so people hang on your every word
• Presuppositional questioning to access and anchor their emotions
• A conversation management system that allows you subject / client / prospect the illusion of control whilst you direct the conversation wherever you need it to go

To find out more about Advanced Persuasion Patterns, the leading hypnotic persuasion skills programme on the internet you can click through this link.

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Tags: Leadership, Managers